Tamara Đermanović, Put u moju nepostojeću zemlju
Review of: Ana Lasica - Put u moju nepostojeću zemlju, TAMARA ĐERMANOVIĆ, Beograd: Samizdat b92, 2018., 216 str.
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Review of: Ana Lasica - Put u moju nepostojeću zemlju, TAMARA ĐERMANOVIĆ, Beograd: Samizdat b92, 2018., 216 str.
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Review of: Dejan Jović - Todor Kuljić, Manifest sećanja levice: kontrasećanje potlačenih i zaboravljenih, Beograd: Klio, 2021, 286 str.
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Intensive inter-ethnic violence against civilians is one of the key characteristics of wars conducted on the territory of former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Besides war crimes committed during military operations, examples of inter-ethnic violence include various forms of treatment of ethnic Others in areas not directly affected by war. The author uses the campaign of blasting of civilian objects in and around the town of Bjelovar in Croatia as a case-study. The research is the first historiographical attempt of reconstruction of events in Bjelovar, based od juridical, police and other documents, as well as witness-statements. Applying Mila Dragojević's concept of amoral community, the author explains the motives and reasoning behind this type of inter-ethnic violence.
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The frozen conflict in Transnistria ranks among a series of interethnic clashes which broke out at the periphery of the Soviet Union in light of its dismemberment. However, Transnistria`s case, compared to other frozen conflicts in the ex-Soviet space, stands out due to the absence of interethnic animosities prior to 1989. The systemic changes caused the eruption of the conflict, and the intergroup rivalry did not necessarily derive from ethnic belonging; it was the following war in March 1992 that yielded the idea of the “Transnistrian identity”. This article re-examines how identity was created and manipulated in the MASSR, Transnistria`s political ancestor. The creation of the MASSR in 1924, with the aim to regain Bessarabia from Romania, and to spread communism outside de Soviet borders, was accompanied by a series of policies that promoted a new, local identity. These policies had taken various forms and lasted until the Soviet Union reoccupied Bessarabia in 1940. Their reinvestigation serves as opportunity of reassessing the MASSR as the prototype for identity fabrication in Transnistria. In the context of the current frozen conflict, such approach on the MASSR as a historical precedent throws fresh light on the emergence of the new “Transnistrian identity”.
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Nieudane próby zakorzenienia marksizmu w polskiej historiografii, podejmowane z powodów ideologicznych oraz politycznych w minionej epoce Polski zwanej górnolotnie „ludową”, doprowadziły do sytuacji z metodologicznego punktu widzenia zaiste kuriozalnej. Rezultat jest bowiem taki, że dekady poprzedzające interesujące nas z górą trzydziestolecie ugruntowały i tak dobrze wcześniej osadzony w naszym dziejopisarstwie pozytywizm.
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This article provides an overview of some of the most prevalent topics in post-Yugoslav memory politics as well as on some of the scholars working on these issues, focusing on the commemorative practices of the Second World War and the wars of the 1990s. Thirty years after the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, the discourse of post-war memory politics continues to dominate nearly all of the successor states, even though two of them have seemingly left the past behind to join the European Union. While the wars of the 1990s created an entirely new memory scape in the region, they also radically transformed the way in which each country commemorated the Second World War. Although the article examines in-depth the collective remembrance of sites of memory, such as Jasenovac, Bleiburg, and Knin, trends across the broader region are also addressed. The work of young scholars, as well as experienced researchers, who have introduced innovative approaches in memory studies in the former Yugoslavia, is highlighted to show how new studies focus on the cultural reproduction of dominant narratives in addition to top-down political discourse.
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The article aims to analyse the impact of historical memory on foreign and security policy using the example of the Serbia – Kosovo relations in the period of 2014-2019. Historical memory is a burden, challenge and opportunity for foreign and security policy, and has a considerable impact on bilateral relations between countries which used to be in conflict. Historical memory generates numerous research questions – who is the architect of memory? what are the actors? what are the mechanisms, tools and instruments of its creation? how is it used to maintain power and what are its effects? – to name but a few. In the example analysed, leaders use historical memory to create separate identities and gain power, whereas NGOs do it to commemorate victims. Historical memory is present in celebrating important dates, historical places, monuments and events, and creating national heroes. It also draws attention to the stereotypes in school textbooks and to transitional justice. The most important space for historical memory in the analysis is Kosovo and the role of an international organisation – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Historical memory has an important function in the process of regional reconciliation, which is an essential condition for cooperation and security in the Western Balkans.
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The aim of the article is historical, political analysis and analysis of scientific discourse on the direction of decommunization transition since Ukraine’s independence. The main research question concerns the effectiveness of the process. When describing the decommunization of public space in Ukraine, it should be stressed that it was characterized by varying intensity and regionality. The process can be divided into two main phases – 1990-2014 and after 2015. The first period was determined by the historical policy pursued by the presidents of Ukraine. During the presidency of Yushchenko, with the increasing interest in historical politics, and especially the theme of Holodomor 1932/33, the names and monuments in honor of those responsible for these events were removed. The last phase of decommunization involves four acts passed in April 2015. The pace and consistency with which the laws were implemented, especially 317-VIII on communist symbolism, was linked to the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. It determined the need for radical steps towards the Ukrainian state taking control of its own symbolic space. A parliamentary majority and a social atmosphere have made the implementation of the laws effective and today Ukraine can be considered to have decommunized public space. This does not apply, of course, to occupied areas.
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The article presents an analysis of the operations of the Whitney Plantation Museum, which opened in 2014 in Wallace, LA (USA), situated within the context of plantation heritage tourism in the American South. The argumentation offers an illustration of the significant transition, even though still of marginal character, of the dominant tendencies of representing slavery in heritage sites (plantation museums) devoted to cultivating knowledge about the history of the region. New materialist in its orientation, the analysis subscribes to the most fundamental assumption of this philosophical tendency, namely that knowledge is generated in material-semiotic ways, and applies this approach in an enquiry into the educational experience offered to visitors by this heritage site. The article argues that although the emergence of institutions such as Whitney Plantation is meant to pluralise the memorial landscape of a given community, rather than serving as multivocal spaces they tend to remain steeped in fragmentation.
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The author links the current systemic lack of regulation of occupational diseases in Slovenia to the socio-political changes and transformations of political relations that have taken place in the last thirty years – to the paradigm of self-responsibility in the feld of health and work and to the social understanding occupational diseases and work-related illnesses. She also focuses on the history of the occupational health and safety profession. She does not look at occupational health and safety from the biomedical viewpoint but rather fom the political-economic and socio-cultural perspective. She explains occupational health as a political and social phenomenon related to people‘s structural vulnerability. In her exploration of the experiences of work-related illness and injury, the author draws on ethnographic research with textile workers.
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An interview with Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a historian, philologist and essayist. Interviewers: Aleksander Palikot and Jerzy Sobotta
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Historical memory related to the Second World War is too complex for there to be a single version recognised around the world. This is because historical “truth” is by no means a simple matter of black and white. Addressing various blindspots and imbalances in understandings of the past may subsequently help tackle difficult historical legacies at political, legal and civil society levels.
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A conversation with Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Interviewer: Adam Reichardt
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Despite a growing number of novel approaches to the far right and new explanatory models, one feature appears to persist in the scholarship: namely, a tendency to discuss the developments in Western Europe and in postsocialist countries separately. Bucking this trend, this article investigates the similarities between the activism of Italian and Polish far-right movements, focusing on the field of historical politics. More specifically, it investigates the ways in which the memories of World War II and accounts of victims of communism are mobilized in the two countries, as well as the question of “censorship” and “mainstreaming” of far-right historical narratives. Apart from comparing the developments in these countries, the article discusses various forms of cooperation between Polish and Italian far-right movements, which reveal their mutual influences but also the limits of transnational networking.
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In recent years and decades, authoritarian regimes and illiberal democracies have passed and enforced punitive memory laws, intending to ban certain interpretations of past events or sheltering official versions of history against challenges. This comes as no surprise in countries whose governments undermine pluralism and assume the existence of a historical truth that is stable over time, invariable, and self-explanatory. But why do liberal democracies, committed to political pluralism and open debate, pass laws that penalize challenges to certain interpretations of the past and restrict freedom of speech? This article argues that liberal democracies may do so yielding to bottom–up pressure by courts and to regulate civil law disputes for which existing legislation and jurisprudence may not suffice. Based on case studies from Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, we also found punitive memory laws in liberal democracies narrower and more precise than in nonliberal states.
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The article analyzes the biographies of the regional leaders of the Solidarity union and examines the process by which activists were recruited into the social movement and subsequently rose through its ranks. Though there exists an abundant body of research on Solidarity, the recruitment process for the trade union’s middle management has never been analyzed. Such an examination of the regional leadership is important given the significant diversity that existed in the selection process. Activists were selected in regions where strikes occurred (Gdańsk and Wałęsa) and in ones where there were no strikes. This article attempts to identify these regional leaders and their role in Solidarity. It poses questions about the social movement’s center of power. Did the regional leadership represent a grassroots social movement, or were they merely carrying out orders from the center? The subject of this analysis is a group of thirty-nine chairmen comprising the regional leadership of Solidarity. The article employs classical historical analysis methods combined with elicited sources (interviews conducted with selected leaders). It presents a prosopographical analysis based on statistical, historical, and sociological data. The questions posed in the article involve such issues as the Solidarity recruitment process, the social backgrounds of the leaders, their individual personality traits and biographical features, and the goals and motivations that led them to join the movement. The analysis reveals the qualities shared by the majority of the regional leadership of Solidarity.
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The article aims at contributing to the social history of the Solidarity movement by tracing the collective biography of its elected representatives. It will focus on the life trajectories of the 900 delegates to the First National Congress of Delegates. The convention, held in Autumn 1981, is commonly perceived as a focal moment in the history of Solidarity and plays a crucial role in almost every academic narrative on the anticommunist opposition. Often seen as a first genuine Polish parliament since pre-war times, its main task was to forge the political and economic programme thus furthering the revolution. The projected research will draw on genuine methodology, combining prosopographical and oral history approach. The research will address mainly the following issues: what social strata the elites came from, what was their cultural and educational background, what motives/causes/expectations drove them to engage with Solidarity, to what generations did they belong, how did they embrace the character of political transformation of 1989, and to what extent and how did they get involved in the political, economic, and social life of post-communist Poland. In general, the paper seeks to shed a new light on our understanding of Solidarity’s social roots—for instead examining to what extent the contesting, revolutionary elites were a product of the Stalinist social advancement. It also tries to depict the level of continuity between the elites of 1981 and post-1989—thus testing the common theories whether the Third Republic is (or is not) rooted in the legacy of Solidarity.
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Across Eastern Europe how the past is remembered has become a crucial factor for understanding present-day political developments within and between states. In this introduction, we first present the articles that form part of this special section through a discussion of the various methods used by the authors to demonstrate the potential ways into studying collective memory. We then define the regional characteristics of Eastern Europe’s mnemonic politics and the reasons for their oftentimes conflictual character. Thereafter we consider three thematic arenas that situate the individual contributions to this special section within the wider scholarly debate. First, we examine the institutional and structural conditions that shape the circulation of memory and lead to conflictive constellations of remembering; second, we discuss how different regime types and cultural rules influence the framing of historical episodes, paying attention to supranational integration and the role of technological change; third, we consider the different types of actors that shape the present recall of the past, including political elites, social movements, and society at large. We conclude by identifying several promising avenues for further research.
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The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a “cosmopolitan” memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in “old” continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries’ history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory.
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This text is a multi-faceted analysis – economic, symbolic, and ideological – of the destruction of monuments commemorating white historical figures such as Josephine de Beauharnais and Victor Schœlcher in the summer of 2020 in French overseas departments. Violence, racism, the logics of repentance, and revolutionary elements indicate the existence of a significant crisis in the Fifth Republic and, perhaps, announce a new order. The text also contains the hypothesis that acts of vandalism are part of the global tendency to reject the colonial past.
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